Google chooses Kansas City, Kansas, as broadband mecca

There's no place like home -- especially if you live Kansas
City, Kansas, where houses will soon be connected to the net by fibreoptic cables that Google promises
will deliver 1-gigabit-per-second internet connections -- roughly a hundred times faster than a typical
10-Mbps cable connection. With that fast a connection, it becomes
possible to download a full-length feature film from iTunes in
seconds.

More than 1,100 cities and town applied to be the testbed,
highlighting the dismal state of broadband connections around the
US. The Tuesday announcement came after more than a year of
deliberations and a change of leadership in the project. Google
says it will start putting in the fibre with help from vendors and
the utility company this year.

Service will start for the first customers early next year, and
the price will be competitive with what people pay now for an
exponentially slower connection. The long-delayed announcement
comes as AT&T,
the nations' largest DSL provider, announced that it would begin
metering its customers' internet usage and charging overage fees.
Even stricter limitations are in effect in Canada, prompting
Netflix to offer its Canadian users the
option to choose lower bit-rate speeds than their connection can
handle in order to reduce how much data they use a month.

While internet usage is often compared to other utilities, it has
one significant difference -- transferring data into and out of the
net's backbone is cheap. For instance, Time Warner Cable spends
less than three percent of the revenue from its cable ISP service
on data connections, and that percentage is falling even as
customers use more data. The problem ISPs are facing is, however,
capital-intensive. Laying fatter pipes, including fibreoptic
cables, is not cheap, and ISPs want to slow the pace at which they
need to reinvest profits into building out their
infrastructure.Google's project is likely intended to spur
investment by ISPs, because for Google, the equation is simple. The
faster the internet connection, the more people use its search
engine and click on its ads.

As for those communities that didn't win, municipal broadband
advocates have an answer: Build it yourselves. Sadly, however, that
strategy often leads to lawsuits and lobbying by the telecom
incumbents.

Google has said that it will allow ISPs to offer service using
the fibre it lays, an arrangement known as open access that's
designed to create competition and better service.

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